多
Meanings
CC-CEDICT
- 1.many; much; more; a lot of
- 2.too many; in excess
- 3.(after a numeral) ... odd
- 4.how (to what extent) (Taiwan pr. [duó])
- 5.(bound form) multi-; poly-
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Wiktionary
- 1.many; much; a lot of; numerous; multi-; poly-
- 2.over; and more; more than
- 3.as much as
- 4.multiple
- 5.much more; a lot more; far more
- 6.more
- 7.extra; in excess
- 8.how; how much; what
- 9.so; how; what
- 10.to have a lot
- 11.to have more; to have too much; to have too many
- 12.few; little
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Etymology
Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意) – two pieces of meat (肉). In the bronze script, 肉 was corrupted into 夕 due to visual similarity, making 多 into a duplication of 夕. The form with 夕 was inherited in later scripts. Chi (2010) suggests that meat is scarce in ancient times, so two pieces of meat is a lot, citing a passage from Mencius: : Chang Ping-chuan suggests that it is the duplicative nature of the character that gives the meaning of "many", just like in 林 (“forest”), from 木 (“tree; wood”). Etymology unclear. Schuessler (2007) suggests that it is in the same word family as 諸 (OC *tjaː, *tja, “many; all”) and 庶 (OC *hljaɡs, “many”). Hill (2014, 2019) compares it to Tibetan ཆེ (che, “big”), མཐེ་བོ (mthe bo, “thumb”), Burmese တယ် (tai, “very”). STEDT derives the latter two from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ta-j (“big”), whose Chinese comparandum is 大 (OC *daːds, “large”) instead; Baxter (1992) has also compared it to this etymon. Baxter and Sagart (1998) propose that there may be a prefix *t- in this word that gives a mass noun reading, which may nullify the connection to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ta-j (“big”). However, Baxter and Sagart (2014) may have withdrawn from this theory since they no longer indicate the *t as a prefix. Also compare Proto-Tai *ʰlaːjᴬ (“many, much”), whence Thai หลาย (lǎai, “many”) and Zhuang lai (“many”), and Proto-Hlai *hləːy (“many”) (Gong Qunhu, 2002; Schuessler, 2007; Baxter and Sagart, 2014). Schuessler (2007) considers the Chinese word to be from Kra-Dai, but others suggest that the direction of borrowing may have been the other way (Li, 1977; Baxter and Sagart, 1998; Norquest, 2007).
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Stroke order
Components
Components from cjk-decomp · MIT
Example sentences
多美啊！
How beautiful!
你多高？
How tall are you?
多怪啊！
How weird!
多怪啊！
How curious!
它多貴?
How much is it?
多可爱啊！
How cute!
Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR
More examples & usage (AI)
Synonyms
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Derived terms
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA